Connecting to Database

You may want to establish the connections over SSL to encrypt
client/server communications for increased security, or you can use ssh
to encrypt the network connection between clients and the database server.
If either of these is used, then monitoring your traffic and gaining
information about your database will be difficult for a would-be attacker.

User Contributed Notes 2 notes

Another solution to protect your database is to have a seperate backend network exclusively used for database traffic. Your webserver(s) would have two interface cards: one facing the world, one facing the internal database network. This way- there's no chance of intercepting database traffic from the outside.